Tuesday, February 24, 2015

[BoRT Feb. 2015] Band of Gamers: Ingress in Atlanta

For the Lovers of the world, February
14th was the day to look forward to this month. But for
the Players of Ingress, it would have been hard to compete
with the 21st.

Ingress is a free-to-play
massively-multiplayer augmented reality smartphone game created by
Google. As that ridiculous genre list may tell you, it’s also an
incredibly complex game. So I’m going to split this into two
sections. The first section will briefly review the mechanics of the
game, while the second section will report on a real-world Ingress
event from the 21st.

Playing Ingress

Allow me to bottom-line the game for
you:

There are two teams, green and
blue.

The green team (yay!) are
officially called “The Enlightened,” unofficially “Frogs.”

The blue team (boo!) are
officially called “The Resistance,” unofficially “Smurfs.”

These two
teams battle for control of portals and perhaps the fate of the
world.

Gameplay in Ingress revolves
around “portals,” game-world locations which are linked to
real-world locations (churches, museums, public art) via GPS
coordinates. In order to interact with a portal, a player must
physically travel to its real-world location. It is essentially a
gameified version of Google Maps.

Level 8 Portal

Each portal has 8 slots that players
can fill with resonators. The level of the resonators determines the
strength of the portal – level 8 resonators mean a powerful level 8
portal that drops powerful items, level 1 resonators means a weak
level 1 portal that drops weak items. So while a single player could
conceivably play the game by themselves, they would miss out on the
most powerful game items.

Players also have a limit on how many
high-level resonators they can put on an individual portal, based on
their level. Even the highest level players can only deploy one
level 8 resonator on a portal, so making a level 8 portal requires
eight high-level players to gather in a single location.

Friendly portals can be “linked”
in straight lines on the map. When three portals are linked to make a
triangle, a portion of the map is covered in a green or blue field.
Each team's score is determined by how much of the Earth's surface is
covered in their fields. Since links cannot cross other links,
setting up large, strategically valuable fields requires cooperation
from all allied players in a given area.

Boldly They Rode: The Battle of the
O. Lamar Allen Sustainable Education Building

On the 21st, Google hosted
two large events called “Anomalies” in Austin, Texas and
Florence, Italy. The Austin event had sub-events in Atlanta, Las
Vegas, and Columbia while the Florence event had sub-events in the
Czech Republic, Egypt, and Spain.

To cover this historic event, I was
embedded with the heroes of Team 3C, a group of Enlightened players
in downtown Atlanta. I was originally scheduled for Florence, but it
turns out that I am not an actual war correspondent and thus do not
have an expense account.

The mood was tense in the pre-game
meeting, where over a dozen Enlightened players crammed into a single
hotel room. The results of Anomalies affect the ongoing in-game story
of Ingress, and the Smurfs were coming off of a winning streak
in 2014. Team 3C was tasked with taking and holding portals of
extreme importance to the future of the human race - if we lost the
day, humanity would be devoured by an evil supercomputer and/or
aliens.

We discussed strategies, recommended
apps for communicating (GroupMe) and improving phone performance
(NoRoot Firewall). These apps would be crucial for coordinating Team
3C’s actions within the team and with other Enlightened teams in
the area.

One thing that has changed since the
earliest days of Ingress is the development of distinct combat roles
during Anomalies. The rising stakes of the game and the greater
number of players has made specialization a necessity. I was assigned
the role of Destroyer, tasked with using Bursters to clear out enemy
portals and resonators. Others were assigned as Modders, Deployers,
or Linkers.

Team 3C’s first target was the O.
Lamar Allen Sustainable Education Building on the Georgia Tech
campus. Well, technically it was a plaque on the front of the building, but whatever. We marched across the campus grounds and took strategic
positions around the building.

Team 3C arrived first and was able to upgrade the portal to Level 8 without interference. We installed shields and waited in the icy post-dawn air for the enemy to arrive. We traded war stories of Anomalies past and reminisced about our distant homes: Kentucky, Tennessee, and the suburbs of Atlanta.

The O. Lamar Building in real life and in Ingress

Then, a contingent of Smurfs came
charging (well, strolling) over a nearby parking lot. The battle had
begun. Within minutes, the O. Lamar Building was a hotly contested
battlefield – in the game world.

The portal dropped from Level 8 to
Level 3, despite our Deployer’s efforts to replace the destroyed
resonators. The Destroyers switched roles and joined the effort to
defend the portal. My phone’s battery drained at an unsustainable
rate. Even a seasoned imaginary war correspondent such as myself
wondered: could Team 3C hold?

Team 3C valiantly defending the O. Lamar

Then the surrounding portals went blue
and my blood froze: the Smurfs were trying to throw a field over the
Lamar. It was time to do and die. With imaginary bombs exploding
around us, Team 3C’s valiant Destroyers readied our smartphones and
charged the enemy position across the parking lot.

Bursters to the left! Bursters to the
right! Bursters to the front! Through a rain of enemy fire, we
destroyed the enemy’s portals. The Smurfs reclaimed them. We blew
them up again. The Smurfs reclaimed them. And so forth.

Although we were unable to hold the
enemy’s portals, we were able to keep them busy, and above all,
away from the Lamar. The Deployers redoubled their efforts to replace
our destroyed resonators. Team 3C would hold – but at what cost?

And then, a miracle.

Deep in the backwoods of Georgia,
three teams of strategically placed Enlightened players placed three
links that blanketed half of Georgia in an emerald field.

A cheer went up from Team 3C. The
brave soldiers who placed that field missed out on the excitement of
the Anomaly, but their sacrifice of time and gas money would not be
forgotten – or wasted. We attacked the Smurfs with renewed vigor
and drove them back beyond the parking lot.

The battle was over, but the war was
not. Team 3C saw three more engagements that day which time will not
permit me to tell. But will an ungrateful nation soon forget The
Battle of The Wells Fargo Mural, where we braved light precipitation?
Or the horrors of the Long March to the Tuscany Time Piece, which was
several blocks from the Wells Fargo Mural?

But then, Team 3C did not give their
Saturday afternoon for the glory or the honor. We laid down our time
and battery lives for something more important, something which will
echo in the annals of history: experience points.

At the end of the day we made our
final march back to the hotel for the after party, spirits lifted
with the heady thrill of victory and whiskey. On the way, we stopped
by Google’s offices in Atlanta for a team picture.

And Frogs in
Georgia now-a-bed Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not
here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks That
fought with us upon Saint Pepin’s day.

Special thanks to the brave women and men of Team 3C and the Atlanta Enlightened